Vivarium
From the guy from Nocebo, here’s another (previous) horror film with some extremely on the nose subtext. This time it’s personal, it’s all about the suburban proletariat.
In case that is not clear, the main character, the one which we follow almost exclusively, is a primary school teacher, teaching kids to pretend to be trees and attempting to explain to a 8 years old the concept of a cuckoo dumping another bird into its death, since he wanted a nest of its own.
Her boyfriend is a playful manchild, but no big decisions are being taken anyway, so it’s fine. They are looking to buy a house (on a teacher and a handyman’s salaries, it’s tight). The agency has some weirdo frontman, but they agree to go to Yonder and see their suburbia detached homes. Not what a hip young couple is looking for, but then the guy vanishes! Rude!
They try to go back, but the streets are all the same, the houses are all the same, there’s nobody else anywhere, it’s a stable loop that cannot be escaped! They spend a full petrol tank driving around, but no dice. Might as well sleep Inside Number 9, the house they were visiting in the first place. Their only sustenance is champagne and strawberries, their welcome gift.
This shows the first cracks on their relationship, he asserts his dominance by wanting to drive around himself. A truly pointless conflict, why antagonise his girlfriend like that?
Anyway, walking all day towards the sun also doesn’t work, they get back to the same house, but they do get a box of edibles, to be cooked. The boyfriend is cracking already, he burns the house down! When they wake up in the morning, it’s pristine again, but they are full of ashes.
The box is back, but this time has a baby and a message: raise the kid and get free. A tough ask, for some people that were visiting an open house. The “kid” grows by leaps and bounds, three months later, he’s about 10. “Kid” does not capture the creature they ate facing, it’s some kind of SCP entity.
The protagonist wants to treat it well, even though she is suffering, unprepared for the sudden responsibility, and being outright bullied by it. It just screams like a siren when it demands food or any other requests. The guy eventually flips out, and attempts to starve it, but her motherly instincts take over.
After that, she focus on the “baby”, while the boyfriend digs a massive hole, but never reaches anywhere. There is still time for our protagonist to go in a mini trip, before performing her motherly end: preparing the child for adult life and dying. Their bodies are buried, the car taken over and the cycle starts anew.
As I mentioned, the themes are quite on the nose: unpreparedness of parenthood, cycles of seemingly meaningless work, mismatched expectations. All this wrapped in a slow burner, without big set pieces, not even emotionally. Just a low frequency suffering.
I immediately thought about the Infinite IKEA SCP, with a more maternal bent.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.